N

I found this 600-pager hard to put down, to use the old cliché. I recall when I purchased this one many years' back being attracted to the cover blurbs premise and the comment that it was a “masterpiece”. It is not for me a masterpiece, but it sure has a certain literary je ne sais quoi.

This is an alternative history of the death of an independent parliamentarian that causes a fascist takeover of the Australian government during WW2, this government then negotiates a disadvantageous truce with the Japanese. Read how Curtin became Australian PM during the war via the wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtin_government

This states that “Labor under Curtin formed a minority government in 1941 after independents crossed the floor, bringing down the Coalition minority United Australia Party-Country Party Coalition government which resulted from the 1940 election.”
In this alternative it is the Curtin government that falls after the death of MP Norman Cole and then into that void authoritarian takes over.

It is difficult to write too much about the story itself as to do so would give away the plot and so many other events of interest in this fascinating political and cultural thriller. There are few main characters and many that come in and out of the tale. Many are based on real life characters in both the political and the artistic world. The point of those worlds being that the fascist government is typical of fascism in that artists and intellectuals are the mortal enemies and treated as such.

There are two major characters that both tell their story in the first person. Very middle-class public servant Robin Telford tells his in a kind of British University educated manner that I did not at first recognise as Australian but then after a while realised that he was of his times when Australia was still very much part of the British Empire. Britain playing a less than hands on role in the war in Asia and the Pacific plays a large part in the Curtin government falling and later of the decisions of the fascist government and its capitulation to Japan. The second main character is Missy Cunningham the wife of firebrand anti-fascist artist Roy with whom she has a loveless marriage. Telford and Missy's are parallel telling of events that at times join.
The author is a wonderful writer and the structure of the story is very layered in that we move rapidly from one character to another and one event to another very quickly. It makes for compulsive reading in the “what happens next” needs of the reader. There is use of many literary tricks, we get many characters referenced from their times with both the fictional and the real. Roy Cunningham for example is based on Noel Counihan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Counihan

Even literary nods such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and David Meredith of My Brother Jack fame make fleeting appearances. One of the stranger nods to something obscure is that there is a sanatorium called Graylingwell. This is a nod to a place of the same name in Chichester, West Sussex, England. I was intrigued that the author used this as a device, and it turns out he came from Littlehampton, not too far away from the original Graylingwell. I wonder as to how many other nods to names and places I have missed.

What just stops this being a masterpiece? It just lacks a little realism in certain areas. The vast majority of the book is a serious alternative history but, for example, the use of a Bunyip at one point? I could see no metaphor or analogy in its use other than magical realism as a device. We also got a seer who is important to the intrigue, but I just felt that a more realistic device could be used to bring the story together and into its, admittedly fulfilling, conclusion.
Be that as it may, I have enjoyed this immensely and would read again.

Recommended specifically to Australians who know their local art and literature and who looking for an exceptional alternative history. (That cuts out just about the entire reading public on the planet☺.)

Addendum. To give an idea of the research that the author put into this long read, I have attached his notes on research in the spoiler below.

NOTESDrew Cottle's book The Brisbane Line-Reappraisal (Leicestershire: Upfront Publishing, 2002) provided much of the original impetus for N, as did conversation with film and documentary maker John Hughes. Two other books were of particular importance - Bernard Smith's Noel Counihan: Artist and revolutionary (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Craig Munro's Wild Man of Letters: The Story of P. R. Stephensen (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1984), On Counihan and Stephensen, see note, below.The attack on Sydney in Part 3 is written over Erle Cox's Fools' Harvest (Melbourne: Robertson & Mullen, 1939), Fools Harvest, along with a number of other fictional accounts of the invasion of Australia, have been basically treated as non-fictional (historical) texts. The actions of the Japanese in Sydney however are based on events detailed by Iris Chang in her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Ringwood: Penguin, 1997). Warwick's tales of Japanese cruelty in Part 8 come from information in Hank Nelson's Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon (Sydney: ABC, 2001). The descriptions of artists' studios are variously drawn from Émile Zola, Patrick White, Honoré Balzac and John Berger. The description of Mahony's gallery at Teffont is taken from Zola's The Masterpiece. Roy's painting of his 'lover' in Part 6 is derived from Balzac's story, "The Unknown Masterpiece'. The poem Elegy is by Tsujihara, a sergeant in the elite Konoe Division in the Imperial Japanese Army. The English translation is by Richard Tanter. In Part 9, Wood-Conroy's wealthy friend's view of the Japanese weighed against the Curtin Government is taken from E. P. Dark's, Medicine and the Social Order (Sydney: F. H. Booth, 1942), The guerrilla tactics adopted by Mischka and his companions are based on those outlined variously in Rupert Lockwood's Guerrilla Paths to Freedom (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1942). The Social Realist painters found their beginnings in the world of Noel Counihan, Vic O'Connor and Yosl Bergner. As did Albie Henningsen in that of P. R. 'Inky' Stephensen, and Wood-Conroy in Alf Conlon. And so forth. ‘N' is, however, a work of fiction and any similarity between a character and any person living or dead is wholly coincidental. Epigraphs taken from Goya's Disasters of War in Part 3 may be translated thus: Esto es peor, This is worse; Yo le ci, I saw it; Por qui? Why?; Qué bai gue bacer mas? What more can one do?;, Fuerte casa es! This is too much!; No saben el camino, They don't know the way.'Fadden, War Cabinet', 'Pencil on Paper, September 1941', 'The Americans Arrive' and 'The Americans depart' first appeared in Southerly, Vol. 66, No 3, 2006. 'Curtin, War Cabinet, April, 1942', 'John Menadue: Syria, 1942' and 'Mahony's Soirée' first appeared in Heat, No 17, 2008.An additional narrative strand, chronicling the history of Surrealist André Breton in Melbourne, 1942, omitted from this version of N for reasons of overall length, appears in Southerly, Vol. 73, No 3, 2013 ('The Naked Writer').

http://melbourneblogger.blogspot.com/2011/09/anti-fascist-art-exhibition-melbourne.html

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-violent-vision-of-the-1940s/

http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/tag/john-scott/